The Cottage Smallholder

Quite often I sit at the kitchen table and think about the people that have sat in this room over the last 360 years. Until 25 years ago this was a small two bedroomed cottage with a couple of lean to barns each side. Probably in its infancy, our kitchen housed cattle and hens along with the humans.

Three hundred years ago, domestic livestock often shared the ground floor with the inhabitants of a cottage. Upstairs was the purely human realm, with a scatter of dogs and cats that crept up and were welcomed to warm cold feet on a chilly night. It’s likely that the cottagers living here tilled the fields that now host roads and houses in the village. Just the gardens hold a faint echo of what went before.

I don’t know when the lean to barns were built. The beams are not ancient. But could have replaced ones infested with woodworm. Like everyone that lives in a really old place, we coexist with woodworm. It’s difficult to keep on top of the problem. Sometimes I lie awake at night and think about them gradually chomping through the wood deep within the cottage walls. They outnumber us and fumigation just holds them at bay.

25 years ago the south facing barn was converted into a downstairs bathroom and the sitting room was extended. The Rat Room ranges above. A wonderful space that is mysteriously cushioned from the noise of the cottage. A big window, set into the roof overlooks the garden. Too high to observe anything but sky and the tops of trees when you are sitting at the desk beneath.

The room is like a tree house attached to the cottage. Accessed by a small door beside our bed, it’s like stepping into a different world. Large insects, that I’ve never seen on ground level, land on the window to rest. The same window opens the sound of rippling leaves. In spring these leaves are full of birds and nests and the excitement of a fresh beginning.

It’s our cottage but we are only the keepers, like the long line of people who lived here before us. Babies were born here, cows calved inches from where I sit now and occasionally someone didn’t wake in a bed upstairs.